Thursday 5 February 2015

MyPinballs: Day 1

myPinballs 
http://mypinballs.com/
Placement/Work Experience
26 - 28 January 

Read the intro here.

I was staying in Leeds during my visit, Jim is based in Pudsey which is just around half an hour by bus from Leeds city centre. In the morning I arrived we spent some time speaking about pinball, the different parts of Jim's company and having a few cups of tea of course.

myPinballs is clearly split into three different areas of work 1) Restoration 2) Electronics 3) Software. During the couple of days of my visit we managed to go over all of these areas, and managed to get stuck into helping out with some especially the restoration.

Twilight Zone playfield restore
Twilight Zone is one of the top rated pinball machines, it just so happened Jim had one in for restoration when I was scheduled to be on placement. Restoration by myPinballs.

Lamps

Old lamps removed on left need to be replaced. In the tub, the lamp sockets which twist in & out of the lighting boards on right - all ready to be cleaned. Restoration by myPinballs.

Switches

Top left is an old switch connected to the playfield - note the wear on the copper switches. Top right is a new switch assembled. Bottom left all switches ready to go and finally a switch in place in the playfield after being soldered in by Jim. Restoration by myPinballs.

Clean
Before and after - on top, the subway - you can see dirt from the ball track in the center. Bottom built up dirt around a rubber part - now nice and clean! Restoration by myPinballs.


The manual

This is the bible for any owner of a machine - most games have their own one. Jim collects these manuals. As well as diagrams for most parts, there is a table of the different solenoids and a wire colour guide - so you can identify the location for each part. Restoration by myPinballs.

Bumpers

To finish up the day we managed to finish off assembling the jet bumpers or "Town Square" in this Twilight Zone game. Restoration by myPinballs.
Continue to day two...

All work shown here courtesy of myPinballs.

Follow Jim's Adventure in Pinball via myPinballs blog at blog.mypinballs.com.
Give him a tweet @mypinballs.

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